Book - Science in Social Context-3

40 2 Images of
Science: A Reality Check
of events. Above all, it pointed to the fact that the “meanings” of terms and statements
relevant in inquiry consist in their being used in determinate and overt ways. Pragmatism,
to employ Peircean language, was thus a proposal to understand general terms in terms
of their concrete application, rather than vice-versa. ‘(bold case by FM)
At the risk of treading upon ground on which angels fear to step, I should also like to men-
tion the elementary point that in terms of Peirce's emphasis neither terms nor statements
can be regarded as designating, independently of the habits involved in their use.
Consequently, “the meaning” of expressions is not to be sought in self-subsisting “facts”,
“essences”, or other “designata”, but must be construed in terms of the procedures associ-
ated with them in specific contexts.
‘Peirce claimed no infallibility for the beliefs of every-day experience, and indeed one of the
cardinal tenets of his thought was a universal fallibilism. Peirce’s fallibilism is a conse-
quence of his regarding the method of science as the most successful yet devised for achiev-
ing stable beliefs and reliable conclusions; it has nothing to do with the malicious scepticism
which rejects science on the ground that its conclusions are after all not established as
being beyond the possibility of error, only to invoke a special set of imperatives as indubi-
table objects of human endeavour. Peirce noted that the conclusion of no scientific inquiry
is exempt from revision and correction, that scientists feel surer of their general logic of
procedure than of any particular conclusions reached by it, and that the method of science
is self-corrective, both as to its own specific features and the specific conclusions gained
with it.’ Read at the Fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science, Harvard
University, September 3–9, 1939. (Nagel, 1940)
Habermas in his Erkenntnis und Interesse in 1968 translated in English in

1971 (ref) devoted two chapters to Peirce: ‘What separates Peirce from both early
and modern positivism is his understanding that the task of methodology is not to
clarify the logical structures of our scientific theories but the logic of the procedure
with whose aid we obtain scientific theories. We term information scientific if and
only if an uncompelled and permanent consensus can be obtained with regard to its
validity. This consensus does not have to be definitive but has to have definitive
agreement as it goal….modern science distinguishes itself by a method of arriving
at an uncompelled consensus about our views.’ p91 ‘For Peirce there was one
method of inquiry, based on deduction, induction and to a small degree inference to
the best explanation (designated abduction by Peirce). Truth was roughly, whatever
hypothesizing, induction and testing settled down on.’ (p118) Peirce named it the
‘scientific method’, the logic of or method of inquiry, but he did not mean to suggest
that it is a logical formal system that allows us to get to the truth. Habermas: ‘For
Peirce this concept of truth is not derivable merely from the logical rules of the pro-
cess of inquiry, but rather only from the objective life context in which process of
inquiry specifiable functions: the settlements of opinions, the elimination of uncer-
tainties, and the acquisition of unproblematic beliefs-in short the fixation of belief.’
p119 Peirce resolutely rejected the Cartesian foundations, transcendental necessity
and conditions, the so-called ‘spectator theory of knowledge’ that assumes the fact-
value dualism. ‘For Peirce it is the method’, says Habermas, ‘that takes over the role
of an unshakable foundation, the a priori judgements that per definition cannot be
doubted because they are a ‘given’. p97 This thinking of Peirce was many years
later followed up by great men like Sellars and Quine. Peirce assumed a constant
2.2 Part 2. The Crisis in Analytical Philosophy 41
state not of scepticism but fallibilism, with continuous doubt about our claims in
which he anticipated much of Popper’s falsificationism published in 1935.
John Dewey already concluded in the beginning of the twentieth century in many
of his writings that philosophy appeared to be an internal debate for philosophers,
esoteric and of little value to understanding and guiding the practice of scientific
investigation and its relation to reality, society and human life. Dewey in The Quest
for Certainty (1933) and elsewhere wrote extensively about what Bernstein called
‘the ‘Cartesian Anxiety’, the belief of Descartes that the philosopher’s quest is to
search for an Archimedean point on which we ground our knowledge’. (1983, p16)
I will cite the crisp and concise remarks of Hacking about Dewey’s criticism of the
philosophy of science of the empiricist and positivistic tradition. Hacking later con-
fessed (Misak, 2007) that he himself found it hard to read Dewey, ‘it goes on and
on’ and that feeling is familiar to me. Hacking: ‘Truth is whatever answers to our
present needs, or at least those needs that lie at hand. Dewey gave us the idea that
truth is warranted acceptability. The world and our representation of it seems to
become at the hands of Dewey very much a social construct. Dewey despised all
dualism- mind/matter, theory/practice, thought/action, fact/value. He made fun of
the ‘spectator theory of knowledge’. He said it resulted from the existence of a lei-
sure class, who thought and wrote philosophy, as opposed to a class of entrepre-
neurs and workers who had not the time for just looking.
Hacking, says about Dewey: ‘My own view, that realism is more a matter of
intervention in the world, than of representing it in words and thought, surely owes
much to Dewey.’ (p62) (Hacking, 1983). Pragmatism, from Peirce, Dewey, James,
Nagel, Quine to Habermas and Hacking, is beyond Cartesian empiricist philosophy
and holds that it is this relation to practice, intervention, and actions based on our
accepted beliefs that gives value to our beliefs, and not timeless transcendent formal
principles that cannot be tested.
Karl Popper (1902–1994), was a most influential philosopher of science who in
his later years also wrote extensively about the open society, freedom and democ-
racy. He was in time and space close to the empiricist positivist philosophers of the
Vienna Circle but did however not agree with most of their philosophy. In his “Logic
der Forschung: zur erkenntnisstheorie der modernen naturwissenschaft” published
in 1935, a translation of which appeared in 1959 under the title “The Logic of
Scientific Discovery”, he criticised the positivist and empiricist philosophy on their
major ideas. It has been said that this critique, after the members of the Vienna
Circle having tried to incorporate some of it, eventually in the 1950s caused the
declaration of the death of logical positivism. Popper wrote in his autobiography,
Unended Quest (chapter 17), that he rather thought the Vienna Circle came to end
because they did not address the real problems, but got immersed in debates about
minor problem, puzzles and in particular the meaning of words. Although this
echoes the critique on philosophy of Peirce, James and Dewey, they are not men-
tioned by Popper in this discussion of philosophy of science. Toulmin, but not even
Kuhn is mentioned which is remarkable, given the impact of Kuhn’s work on the
legacy of logical positivists, that was already tangible at the time of Popper’s writ-
ing (Popper, 1976).
42 2 Images of Science: A Reality Check
In the 1958 introduction to the English translation of The Logic of Scientific

Discovery, Popper states that he is a pluralist and he commends the philosophers
‘who do not pledge themselves in advance to any philosophical method, and who
make use of epistemology, of the analyses of scientific problems, theories, and pro-
cedures, and, most important, of scientific discussions. …Its most important repre-
sentatives… were Kant, Whewell, Mill, Peirce, Duhem, Poincaré, Meyerson, Russel
and later in some of his phases Whitehead. Most of those …would agree that scien-
tific knowledge is the result of the growth of common-sense knowledge. But all of
them discovered that scientific knowledge can be more easily studied. It’s very prob-
lems are enlargements of the problems of common-sense knowledge. For example it
replaces the Humean problem of ‘reasonable belief’ by the problem of the reasons
for accepting or rejecting scientific theories.’ p22 (Popper, 1959).
Hacking compared Popper’s philosophy with that of Carnap’s logical positivist
philosophy, saying ‘They disagreed about much, only because they agreed on basics.
It would be nice to have a criterion to distinguish such good science from bad non-
sense or ill-formed speculation.’ (p3) Hacking, who wrote that he has been most
influenced in his early days in England by Popper, concludes that despite these dif-
ferences the positivists and Popper contributed a lot of the timeless image of science
The Legend, that ruled before Kuhn, before 1960: ‘They thought that the natural
sciences are terrific and that physics is the best. It exemplies rationality and from
that they believed in the unity of science.’ p5 (Hacking, 1983).
As I have discussed above, the positivists started with observations from the bot-
tom, building it up into a system of verified statements about the world. Popper did
reject this idea on philosophical logical arguments. In his view it starts top down
with hypotheses, that are based on previously obtained knowledge, discussions with
peers or simply wild ideas. These conjectures and their contexts determine how we
subsequently observe and how we interpret the observations about the world. In
Popper’s view the claims derived from these observations may after severe experi-
mental testing and discussion between scientists become accepted, held to be ‘true’.
However, per definition they are not verified. On the contrary, theories and their
statements are to be regarded falsifiable, open to refutation, at any time by further
testing and criticism. Poppers ‘method’ of conjectures and refutations, and his fal-
sificationism reminds of the ‘scientific method’ described by Peirce 50 years before.
Like Peirce, Popper completely rejected the idea of the independent, ‘given’ foun-
dation and the dichotomy between facts and values. Observation, ideas and theory
were always entangled. In his thinking, like Peirce, Popper emphasized the power
of the method of rigorous and endless testing and of criticism in the community of
peers. “Basic statements are accepted as the result of a decision or agreement, and
to that extent they are a convention. The decisions are reached in accordance with a
procedure governed by rules’….. ‘Thus the real situation is quite different from the
naive empiricist. Or the believer in inductive logic.’….‘Theory dominates the exper-
imental work from its initial planning up tot the finishing touches in the laboratory’.
(p106) In a most fascinating metaphor of the ‘swamp’ he resolutely deals with the
issue of the foundation and the ‘given’. It is the visualization of this powerful meta-
phor that I literally never got out of my mind after reading it in August 1975: ‘The
empirical basis of objective science has thus nothing ‘absolute’ about it. Science
does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were,
above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from
above into the swamp, but not down any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driv-
ing the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop
when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least
for the time being’. (p109).
In his 1972 Addendum he added:‘1. My term ‘basis’ has ironical overtones; it is
a basis but is not firm. 2. I assume a realist and objectivist point of view: I try to
replace perception as ‘basis’ by critical testing’. Our observational experiences are
never beyond testing; they are impregnated with theories. 4. ‘Basic statements …are
like all language, impregnated with theories‘.(p109) In a later paper, The Rationality
of Scientific Revolutions, which takes in to account the community of inquiry and
some of the sociological and psychological aspects of the research process, he
describes the problems that may arise from this phase of debate and criticism due to
the human factor (Popper, 1981) which were discussed in his Conjectures and
Refutations at length (Popper, 1972).
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) is everywhere, when you read about the
demise of the Legend and about his role, or not, in the resurrection of pragmatism
(Misak, 2013b) Quine was familiar to the members of the Vienna Circle but
worked whole his life in the USA. In most cases his contribution is very briefly told
with short citations. He did not write much, but he made an immense mark through
his famous dogma’s on empiricism especially by forever rejecting, on analytic logi-
cal grounds, thus by using their own weaponry, the analytic–synthetic distinction.
This was a blow to the very important yardstick of logical-empiricism and the phi-
losophy of the Vienna Circle (Quine, From a logical point of view, 1956). He dem-
onstrated, or in fact built the argument that the principles of inference that we use to
link theory with experience [observations done via our senses] are as Putnam
(Putnam, 1981) says [not analytical, nor given or timeless foundations but] ‘are just
as much subject to revision as any other aspect of our corporate body of knowl-
edge.’ (p30). These rules are thus not ‘given’, or a priori assumptions but result from
our collective thinking, experience and discussion and are such that as Misak
phrases: ‘everyone would assent to them’ (p200) (Misak, 2013a).
Michael Polanyi wrote in 1959 a short fascinating comment on C.P. Snow’s Two
Cultures that originally appeared in Encounter, a monthly Anglo-American journal
of politics and culture that did fit Polanyi’s political ideas discussed above. This
piece is written in the characteristic polemic style of Polanyi who also here puts the
issue in a larger political neo-conservative frame, criticizing the hard-boiled scien-
tific ideals and naturalistic scientism of Bentham and Marx that in his view disre-
spects truth. ‘Our task is not to suppress specialisation of knowledge but to achieve
harmony and truth over the whole range of knowledge. This is where I see the
trouble. Where a deep-seated disturbance was inherently originally in the liberating
impact of modern science on medieval thought and has only later turned pathologi-
cal’.. ‘Science rebelled against authority. It rejected deduction from first causes in
favour of empirical generalisations. Its ultimate ideal was a mechanistic theory of
the universe, though in respect man it aimed only at naturalistic explanation of his
moral and social responsibilities’. ‘..scientific rationalism has been the chief guide
towards all the intellectual, moral, and social progress on which the nineteenth
century prided itself- and to the great progress achieved since then as well. …Yet it
would be easy to show that the principles of scientific rationalism are strictly speak-
ing nonsensical. No human mind can function without accepting authority, custom
and tradition: it must rely on them for the mere use of a language. Empirical induc-
tion, strictly applied can yield no knowledge at all and the mechanistic explanation
of the universe is a meaningless ideal….because the prediction of all atomic posi-
tions in the universe would not answer any question of interest to anybody’.
‘Scientific obscurantism has pervaded our culture and now distorts even science by
imposing on it false ideals of exactitude’. (p41) (Polanyi & Grene, 1969).
Ernest Nagel has been an influential philosopher, not only through his famous
textbook The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation.
(Nagel, 1961) In that pre-Kuhnian seminal work he covered the whole of the phi-
losophy of science of those days, but mostly limited to mainstream analytical phi-
losophy, logical-positivism and empiricism and Popper’s philosophy. There is a
very short discussion of ‘instrumentalism’ which refers to American Pragmatism.
He was sympathetic to pragmatism as I will discuss later and in his introductory
chapter he makes a few remarkable statements which are a critique of the empiricist-
positivist philosophy of the ‘Legend’ that he discusses in the next 300 pages of his
book. ‘The practice of the scientific method is the persistent critique of arguments
in the light of tried canons for judging the reliability of the procedures by which
evidential data are obtained and for assessing the probative force of the evidence on
which conclusions are based’. ….‘the difference between the cognitive claims of
science and common sense which stems from the fact that the former are the prod-
ucts of scientific method, does not connote that the former are invariably true.’……
‘If the conclusions of science are the products of inquiries conducted in accordance
with a definite policy for obtaining and assessing evidence, the rationale for confi-
dence in those conclusions as warranted must be based on the merits of that policy.
It must be admitted that the canons for assessing evidence which define the policy
have, at best, been explicitly codified only in part, and operate in the main only as
intellectual habits manifested by competent investigators in the conduct of their
inquiries. But despite this fact the historical record of what has been achieved by
this policy ….leaves little room for serious doubt concerning the superiority of the
policy….’ (p18)
‘For in point of fact, we do not know whether the unrestrictedly universal (positivist-
empiricist premises) assumed in the explanation of the empirical sciences are indeed true…
.’were this Aristotelian requirement adopted few if any of the explanations given by modern
science could be accepted’… ‘In practice it would lead to the introduction …that explana-
tions are being judged to have merit by the scientific (p43)
Polanyi, who as we saw criticized positivism, concludes two different things

from Nagel’s account of science: ‘Nagel implies that we must save our belief in the
truth of scientific explanations by refraining from asking what they are based upon.
Scientific truth is defined, as that which scientists affirm and believe to be true. Yet
this lack of philosophical justification has not damaged the public authority of sci-
ence, but rather increased it’(Polanyi, 1967)
Marxism? Critical Theory?

Before discussing Kuhn’s work and immense impact from the 2020 perspec-
tive, I want here from the 1977 perspective refer to another writer who has
until this day influenced my thinking about science, research and society. In
September 1976, after a year of philosophy, I had returned to the lab bench to
study for my Masters in immunology at the Academic Hospital of the
University of Groningen. I continued reading about science and in the Spring
1977 I read Jerom Ravetz’s book ‘Scientific Knowledge and its Social
Problems’ (Ravetz, 1971). Ravetz (1929-) is a mathematician who became a
philosopher of science. After his graduation in the US, he came in the late
1950s to the UK at a time when his even moderate Marxist sympathies were
problematic with McCarthyism in the US. In Europe Marxist sympathies in
the 1960s and 1970s were not at all a problem in academia and Critical Theory
was very much under the influence of neo-marxist political and social think-
ing. At university in the early 1970s, there were hard-liners, but one was
mostly exposed to Marxism-Light as I would call it. With this I mean, the
analyses of socio-economic powers and dynamics, taken out of the Marxist
view of inevitable collapse of capitalism and then post-capitalist utopia of the
salvation state which had already then not proved realistic in rapidly changing
and adapting capitalist economies. However, when re-reading the two collec-
tions edited by Rose and Rose from 1976, which I read in 1977, that provide
a series of articles on science and society, from an downright Marxist perspec-
tive, the Marxist jargon, the mentioning of the blessings of Maoism and the
illusion of the end of capitalism and the bourgeoisie is quite weird. Indeed,
Stalinism and Leninism and then the Cold War as discussed had blocked these
analyses of science and society in the US. Ravetz was most of his professional
life affiliated with the Centre for Philosophy and History of Science in Leeds
where he worked for a short period of time with Toulmin. Ravetz in his book
presents a comprehensive analysis of science and research, starting with prob-
lems that he expected would become more prominent. He discusses in depth
the consequences of what he called ‘the industrialization’ of science which
goes against the Mertonion norms with its protection of property and top-
down management. He argued that because of enormous increase in scale,
loss of social and ethical control, the system would increasingly face poor
quality ‘shoddy’ research because of the lack of shared value of individual
researchers with the scientific community. On the other hand, he is deeply
concerned about the external influences on the research agenda by powerful
private parties, multi-nationals, but also the military and governments. We
(continued)
know noe that Ravetz writing that book at that time was quite visionary.
During his whole career he studied issues of uncertainty, risks and unwanted
effects attached to the use of novel scientific knowledge and technology in
society (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1990; Ravetz, 2011). He wrote about the ethics
of science and scientists and criticizes the claim ‘of neutrality’ that was used
by researchers to evade their social responsibility. At that early stage prepar-
ing for my professional life, reading this book for me was truly a transforma-
tive experience and Jerry Ravetz was an inspiration and it was special that he
participated when in the late fall of 2012 through 2013 we prepared for the
start of Science in Transition described in Chap. 3.
The huge impact of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pub-

lished in 1962, has already been mentioned many times. It has opened up the debates
in the history and sociology of science, but at the same time affected the domain of
the philosophers showing through historical and sociological research the problems
of logical positivism. Kuhn presented a descriptive account of what scientists do,
which sociologically, but also (methodo)logically deviates from the normative posi-
tivist scientific method. He did however not provide judgement about the way sci-
ence was actually done from the philosophical perspective (positivism) and did not
propose an alternative correct formal method. This, in the eyes of his critics, was not
logic or if it was logical, they did not agree. They asked the question whether Kuhn’s
description wasn’t in fact normative. They make it, Kuhn writes in discussion with
his critics, clear that they don’t like his normative prescriptions using terms as ‘cor-
rupt our understanding and diminish our pleasure’ and ‘a plea for hedonism’.
(Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970) They accuse Kuhn not using logic while they them-
selves use normative non-cognitive arguments and language. (p237). ‘History and
social-psychology are not, my critics claim, a proper basis for philosophical con-
clusions’ (p235). This is an important issue as it points to the gap between the phi-
losophy and the practice of science. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds.
Lakatos and Musgrave (Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970) is based on the contributions to
a symposium held 13 July 1965 in London. In the final chapter, Reflection on my
Critics, Kuhn declares his epistemological viewpoints that are beyond positivism,
foundationalism and Popper’s theory of falsification, but not sceptic nor relativistic.
In fact, Kuhn states that his descriptive account of the process of inquiry at the same
time indeed is normative. Because, if you want your inquiry to succeed you should
use that process, that scientific method, which of course involves logic, mathemat-
ics, statistics and other accepted methods at a given moment in time in a research
community. Indeed, science as Kuhn concluded, is a process of the community and
not of an individual. A lot of the discussion in Criticism in my reading then indeed
was about the differences between the descriptive historical and in some respect
sociological mode of Kuhn’s approach versus the normative mode of especially
Popper and to some degree Lakatos. Popper admits that normal science exists, but
finds it degrading and compares it to applied science and warned for the dangers
normal science could pose to science. This is very reminiscent of the elitist scientific
attitudes Snow and Medawar were criticising. Popper even suggested Kuhn did not
seem to dislike normal science, whereby he exhibited his normative way, not only
of theorizing about science, but also of judging scientists (p52, 53).
I cite some of the most interesting lines of Kuhn:
‘I am no less concerned with rational reconstruction, with the discovery of essen-
tials, than are philosophers of science. My objective, too, is an understanding of
science, of the reasons for its special efficacy, of the cognitive status of its theo-
ries. But, unlike most philosophers of science, I began as an historian of science,
examining closely the facts of scientific life’
Kuhn ‘discovered that much scientific behaviour, including that of the very greatest
scientists, persistently violated accepted methodological canons,…’ p236
In the current context of course the question is: who exactly had accepted these
canons? Philosophers, but apparently not researchers! In response to Lakatos, Kuhn
describes succinctly his conceptual frame:
‘some of the principles deployed in my explanation of science are irreducibly sociological,
at least at this time. In particular, confronted with the problem of theory-choice, the struc-
ture of my response runs roughly as follows: take a group of the best available people with
the most appropriate motivation; train them in some science and in the specialties relevant
to the choice at hand; imbue them with the value system, the ideology, current in their dis-
cipline (and to a great extent in other scientific fields as well); and, finally, let them make
the choice. If that technique does not account for scientific development as we know it, then
no other will. There can be no set of rules of choice to dictate desired individual behaviour
in the concrete cases that scientists will meet in the course of their careers. Whatever scien-
tific progress may be, we must account for it by examining the nature of the scientific group,
discovering what is values, what it tolerates, and what it disdains. That position is intrinsi-
cally sociological, and, as such, a major retreat from the canons of explanation licensed by
traditions which Lakatos labels justificationism and falsificationism, both dogmatic, and
naïve’. p237, 238.
It is important to take note that Lakatos, in his one-hundred-page long contribu-

tion to this book, wrote that this debate ‘did not start with Kuhn. An earlier wave of
‘psychologism’ followed the breakdown of justificationism. For many, justification-
ism represented the only possible form of rationality: the end of justificationism
meant the end of rationality …………After the collapse of Newtonian physics,
Popper elaborated new, non-justificationist critical standards. Finding them unten-
able, they identify the collapse of Popper’s naïve falsificationism with the end of
rationality self.’ P178. Lakatos, a true Popperian and believer in the ‘scientific
method’ at that time, started to work on his concept of Research Programmes, a mix
of Popperian and Kuhnian thought.
In the remainder of the chapter, Kuhn responds to the critique that his description
of science, without a rejection of the methods used, opens the doors to relativity and
nihilism. It was argued that personal opinion, mob psychology and elites with power
and vested professional interests could determine the outcome of discussions
regarding theory choice. He cites the non-cognitive, but important criteria and
values that are being used and accepted in communities of inquirers and have been
implied by Popper in his normative description of theory choice, including ‘accu-
racy, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness’. (P261, 262) Kuhn emphasizes that these are
not rules that can be applied in a straightforward manner and his historical research
has shown that they may evolve and change over time in the community.
When Kuhn prepared his book, in the late 1950s, logical positivism despite the
prominent works by Quine and Sellars, still ruled in the philosophy of science and
pragmatism was not considered to be a sound and fruitful alternative. Many still
believed that the problems of positivism could be solved by analytical philosophy.
But Kuhn’s analyses and conclusions as expressed above are, although not cited by
him, reminiscent of American pragmatism and the critiques of Peirce and Dewey on
the dominant philosophy of science of their times.
John Ziman (1925–2005) was a physicist who between 1960 and 2000 was one
of the first to write systematically, in depth and broadly about science. In 1968 he
published Public Knowledge (Ziman, 1968) his first of nine books on science and as
Jerome Ravetz, Ziman’s contemporary colleague and science writer, in his obituary
wrote: ‘In this he bypassed the debates among the philosophers who saw science as
a collection of “theories” requiring some sort of logical proof; for him the essential
feature of scientific knowledge is its social character.’ (Jerry Ravetz, Guardian,
February 2005).
It’s Anthropology, Stupid!

In most of their books, Toulmin, Hanson, Ravetz and Ziman, but also Polanyi,
take all aspects of the scientific enterprise into account in their analyses of
how consensus regarding reliable knowledge is produced and thus what dis-
tinguishes science as a social activity. In their opinion it is exactly the com-
plex of the methods, personal psychology, the community and the sociology
of the researchers in organizations that determines what science is. Their writ-
ings went against the widely held believes about science and as a consequence
were virtually neglected by main-stream philosophy, history and sociology.
Because of its multidisciplinarity, in addition their work did not belong to one
of these classical academic disciplines. Similarly, even Bruno Latour in his
We were never Modern complained about the slow recognition of Latour and
Woolgar’s Laboratory Life by philosophers and sociologist of science.
(Latour, 1993; Latour & Woolgar, 1979) This was duly confirmed by Hacking
in his very late 1988 (!) review of ‘Laboratory Life’. With regard to this semi-
nal book of 1979 and his own 1983 book that I here cite a lot and wherein he
argues to take a look at the practice of science, he declares that ‘it was shame-
ful not to examine the one outstanding piece of work then available that took
laboratory science seriously and argued the strong anti-realist doctrine in
existence’.(p278) (Hacking, 1988) Latour pointed out that we do accept
anthropology crossing all these academic territories, but apparently we do not
allow this for an anthropology of the tribe of humanity that is involved in
science.
This may, Ravetz believed, be the reason that this type of work has had
relatively little impact (Ravetz, personal communication 2013). That may
well be the case, but as argued above, meta-science research drew in general
very little attention from those active in research in the academic disciplines
or in the ‘corridors of power’ of academia (Miedema, 2012). Lack of impact
has also been blamed on the fact that the work of these authors lacked a novel
theory, theoretical frame or a specific novel concept. Exceptions to this are
Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge and Toulmin’s metaphor of maps for
theories (1953) and his evolutionary concept of progress in science (1972). I
disagree with this critique, as I my opinion the main hypothesis for which they
provided evidence and which is the basis for this book, is that in the history of
science, the dominant image of science which proved philosophically wrong
around 1960, was strongly politically and culturally determined and has until
now distorted and hurt the practice of science in many different ways. It is on
the basis of these insights, that many scholars have since then began to study
the practice of science. These studies in the recent past have resulted in
renewed movements to improve the practice of science and make it more suit-
able to contribute to solve the grand challenges of the twenty-first century.
John Ziman already in his early books Public Knowledge and Reliable
Knowledge has provided insights from the trenches of science about the
(continued)
problem of the myth of the ‘scientific method’, which at that time still few
others understood and for which Ziman later coined the term ‘the Legend’
(Ziman, 2000). He wondered in 1968 (!) (Ziman, 1968) how this ‘logico-
inductive’ metaphysics of Science.. can be correct, when few scientists are
interested in (it) or understand it, and no one ever uses it explicitly in his
work? But if Science is not distinguished from other intellectual disciplines
neither by a particular style or argument nor by a definable subject matter,
what is it? (p8). He then sketches the social process of inquiry, hypothesis,
testing and criticism and states that ‘it is not a subsidiary consequence of the
‘Scientific Method’; it is the scientific method itself.’‘The defect of the conven-
tional philosophical approach to Science is that it considers only two terms in
the equation. The scientist is seen as an individual, pursuing a somewhat one-
sided dialogue with taciturn Nature. But it is not like that all. The scientific
enterprise is corporate. It is never one individual that goes through all steps
of the logico-inductive chain; it is a group of individuals, dividing their labour
but continuously and jealously checking each other’s contributions’. (p9)
John Ziman could in those days, find virtually no literature on consensus build-
ing by the community and the social process and ‘that makes the Philosophy of
Science nowadays so arid and repulsive. To read the latest volume on this topic is to
be reminded of the Talmud…’ It is fiercely professional and technical and almost
meaningless to the ordinary working scientist. This is unfortunate ..I shall try to
heal the breach by talking semi-philosophically about the intellectual procedures of
scientific investigation.’ (p31).
In Reliable Knowledge: an exploration of the grounds for belief in science
(J. M. Ziman, 1978) an important book in this context, Ziman did the same bypass
as in Public Knowledge as in all his books regarding the philosophical basis of the
Legend. In the introductory paragraph 1.4 he firmly states that from data, diagrams,
models or pictures, ‘meaning cannot be deduced by formal mathematical or logical
manipulation. For this reason scientific knowledge is not so much ‘objective’ as
‘intersubjective’ and can only be validated and translated into action by interven-
tion of human minds’ (p7). Ziman is very realistic and knows the daily practice of
physics and does not conceal weaknesses known to investigators but disguised by
the believers of the Legend: ‘The achievements of intersubjective agreement is sel-
dom logically rigorous; there is a natural psychological tendency for each individ-
ual to go along with the crowd, and to cling to a preciously successful paradigm in
the face of contrary evidence. Scientific knowledge thus contains many fallacies,
mistaken beliefs that are held and maintained collectively and which can only be
dislodged by strong persuasive events.’ (p8.) He describes how scientist are ‘brain-
washed’ during their training in the concept, accepted beliefs and methods in the
current paradigms of their field. He explains in great detail and nuance how in the
‘social model of science’, the scientific community produces the knowledge we
designate as scientific knowledge and what makes it unique and reliable. Ziman
builds further on the work of those who criticised positivism and the Legend -
Polanyi, Hanson, Toulmin and Kuhn- published in the decade before. Ziman points
to fact that there is not one scientific method, there are many dimensions to scien-
tific knowledge and ‘that explains the strange sense of unreality that scientist feel
when they read books about the philosophy of science’ (p84). From this point of
view from the natural sciences, he concludes that the social sciences and humanities
of course can produce reliable scientific knowledge and he states in an unexpected
humanistic lyric paragraph that ‘the challenge to the behavioural sciences is not
coming from physics but from the humanities’. (p185).
Jerome Ravetz in his, in the STS fields well-known, Scientific Knowledge and its
Social Problems presented a unique philosophical-sociological analysis. (Ravetz,
1971) It provides an integrated very rich view of science, its theoretical assump-
tions, its ideologies, power games, issues of ethics and social responsibilities and
the sociology and politics of the system and the interaction with society. Ravetz
cites a broad body of the most relevant scholars at that time. He refers frequently to
the work of his temporaries Toulmin, Ziman, Rose and Rose and especially Polanyi’s
‘Personal Knowledge’ (Polanyi, 1958, 1962). He really ‘took a look’ at the practice
of science and especially emphasizes science as craftmanship and subsequently dis-
cusses the philosophical assumptions about the special status of theories and how
knowledge is produced. He, on the basis of his understanding how science and
research is being done, rejects the positivist and foundationalist ideas With respect
to ‘the scientific method’ and positivism he clearly states that in research the under-
lying ‘principles and precepts that are social in their origin and transmission, with-
out which no scientific work can be done.. guide and control the work of scientific
inquiry.’ (p146) More explicitly: ‘The individual scientist; and the criteria of ade-
quacy are set by his scientific community, not by Nature itself.’ (p149) With respect
to ‘the maturity of a field an important part lies in the strengthening of the criteria
of adequacy. This is not all of course; the development of new tools, and the creation
of an appropriate social environment are equally important. Nor can the strength-
ening of criteria of adequacy be done in an abstract, automatic fashion, as by
attempted imitation of a succesful field (p157). About the relation between philoso-
phy and the practice of science he says: ‘Philosophers of science have attempted,
with some success to provide a rationale for the different basic patterns of argu-
ment, showing why it is reasonable for an intelligent person to place reliance on
them….But as these philosophical arguments become more refined and sophisti-
cated, they drift further and further from the practice of science.’ Finally, for the
present discussion it is of interest to close with the following citation on the dichot-
omy of values and facts. Ravetz, unlike Polanyi, but like Bernal whom he also per-
sonally knew, sees research primary as a social activity that needs conscious
strategies to be able to make proper judgements regarding problem choice. He
explicitly mentioned values other than strict cognitive arguments that have to enter
into these evaluations (p161). ‘The criteria of value, and judgements based upon
them, form an interesting contrast to those of adequacy. …we shall find ourselves
involved in problems of the social activity of science. …The exclusion of problems
of value from the traditional philosophy of science has its roots in the ideology of
modern natural science as it was formed through many generations of struggles…..
the considerations of social value by which all other human activities are assessed
were declared irrelevant’ p160.
Mary Hesse (1924–2016) studied mathematics, physics and philosophy and
taught mathematics and philosophy at several universities in England. She has writ-
ten extensively on the philosophy of science. Mary Hesse wrote in 1972: ‘During
the last half-century much of professional Anglo-American philosophy of science
has been devoted to detailed development of internal logic of natural science based
on empiricist criteria, and also on attempts to show how this logic applies also in
the social sciences and in the study of history. Suggestions….to the effect that there
are other modes of knowledge than the empiricist were sometimes actively resisted
but more usually totally disregarded’. ‘It was held that adoption of at least a modi-
fication this empiricist method is required for human sciences ‘to attain knowledge
status at all’ which in her view is ‘imperialism claimed for natural science’ (p27)
(Hesse, 1972).
‘These distinctions that I believe are made largely untenable by recent more
accurate analyses of natural science.
1. In natural science experience is taken to be objective, testable, and independent
of theoretical explanation. In human science data are not detachable from the-
ory, for what count as data are determined in the light of some theoretical inter-
pretation, and facts themselves have to be reconstructed in the light of
interpretation.
2. In natural science theories are artificial constructions or models, yielding expla-
nation in the sense of logic of hypothetic-deduction: if external nature were of
such a kind, then data and experience would be as we find them. In human sci-
ence theories are mimetic reconstructions of the facts themselves, and the crite-
rion of a good theory is understanding of meanings and intentions rather than
deductive explanation.
3. In natural science the law-like relations asserted of experience and external,
both to the objects connected and to the investigator, since they are merely cor-
relational. In human science relations asserted are internal, both because the
objects studied are essentially constituted by their interrelations with one
another, and also because the relations are mental, in the sense of being created
by human categories of understanding recognized (or imposed? By the
investigator.
4. The language of natural science is exact, formalizable, and literal; therefore,
meanings are univocal, and a problem of meaning arises only in the application
of universal categories to particulars. The language in human sciences is irre-
ducibly equivocal and continually adapts itself to particulars.
5. Meanings in natural science are separate from facts. Meanings in human sci-
ence are what constitute facts, for data consist of documents, inscriptions, inten-
tional behaviour, social rules, human artefacts, and like, and these are
inseparable from their meanings for agents.
‘Let us however concentrate for a moment on the natural science half of the dichotomy what
is immediately striking about it to readers versed in recent literature in philosophy of sci-
ence is that almost every point made about the human sciences has recently been made
about the natural sciences. And that the five points made about the natural sciences presup-
pose a traditional empiricist view of the natural science that is almost universally discred-
ited’ (p277) (Hesse, 1972)
Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature published in 1979 had
enormous and immediate impact and for most scholars of pragmatism was the start
of the pragmatic turn (Rorty, 1979). Rorty, in chapters III and IV, starts by discuss-
ing in depth the serious critiques of Quine and Sellars on the classical dichotomies
of logical positivism. In addition, he took the pragmatic turn in chapter VII discuss-
ing at length Kuhn’s work and putting it firmly in the larger context of the pragma-
tism of John Dewey. He concludes that ‘analytic’ epistemology (i.e. “philosophy of
science”) became increasingly historicist and decreasingly “logical” (as in Hanson,
Kuhn, Harré and Hesse) (p168). He discusses the ‘behavioristic’ critiques of Quine
and Sellars, following Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations published at the
same time in 1953, on ‘the two distinctions the “given” and “that what is added by
the mind” and that between the “contingent” (because influenced by what is given)
and the “necessary” because entirely “within” the mind and under its control)…he
presents them as forms of holism. As long as knowledge is conceived of as accurate
representing- as Mirror of Nature- Quine’s and Sellar’s holistic doctrines sound
pointlessly paradoxical, because such accuracy requires a theory of privileged rep-
resentations, ones which are automatically and intrinsically accurate. …I shall be
arguing that their holism is a product of their commitment to the thesis that justifica-
tion is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) but of conversa-
tion, of social practice. …we understand knowledge when we understand the social
justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of
representation.’(p170)…this is, Rorty says, ‘the essence of what I shall call episte-
mological behaviorism, an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein’. (p174)
‘Epistemological behaviorism (which might be called “pragmatism” were this term
not a bit overladen)…is the claim that philosophy will have no more to offer than
common sense (supplemented by biology, history, etc) about knowledge and truth.
(p176). The term ‘behavioristic’ may seem peculiar, but refers to the social process
by which a community of inquirers come to produce and accept knowledge and
beliefs.
In the pages that follow Rorty dispenses with foundationalism and even with
philosophy at large, the latter goes much too far for philosophers like Kitcher, who
see enough problems to philosophize about. Indeed, since the demise of the Legend,
there is no systematic ‘grand unified theory’ in the philosophy of knowledge. As I
will argue in Chap. 4, pragmatism has a lot to offer with regard to our understanding
and philosophizing about knowledge and knowledge production. As Rorty dis-
cussed (p367), it may not provide a systematic alternative, but it does provide a
hermeneutical method and viewpoint about science and inquiry (see also Kuhn The
essential tension p xiii and xv). This, to many a philosopher of the analytic tradition
may have been disappointing and the main reason to not take pragmatism serious as
philosophy, but must be understood in that pragmatism is a reaction by ‘peripheral’

philosophers (James, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger) to a ‘systematic’ philosophy
which Rorty designates a mainstream analytic ‘superstition’. These ‘peripheral’
philosophers are according to Rorty the ‘edifying’ philosophers. They do not pro-
vide a system with a set of rules but offer moral and intellectual instructions and
enlightenment.
As Flyvberg (2001) argues, hermeneutics is not only relevant for the social sci-
ences but also for the natural sciences ‘as it is now argued that natural sciences are
historically conditioned and require hermeneutic interpretation. Natural scientist,
too, must determine what constitutes relevant facts, methods, and theories; for
example, what would count as “nature”. (p28).
Nancy Cartwright, a mathematician and philosopher who has studied the prac-
tice of physic in relation to the myths of analytical philosophy. She wrote The
Dappled World (Cartwright, 1999) in follow up of How the Laws of Physics Lie
(Cartwright, 1983), in which she discusses the classical ideas of the unity of science
and the myth of the universality of physics and she takes for comparison economics,
the discipline that is famous for imitating (or since the financial crisis having imi-
tated?) physics. The physics that never was, as Cartwright shows. The Dappled
World is a very technical book, but its conclusions (p9 and 10) are clear theories and
claims have been stablished in very artificial settings in the laboratory or as in eco-
nomics by keeping everything else the same (ceteris paribus) both which in the real
world are rare to occur: ‘I conclude that even our best theories are severely limited
in their scope. For, to all appearances, not many of the situations that occur natu-
rally in our world fall under the concepts of these theories…..’‘The logic of the
realist’s claim is two-edged: if it is the impressive empirical successes of our pre-
mier scientific theories that are supposed to argue for their ‘truth’…then it is the
theories as used to generate these empirical successes that we are justified in
endorsing. How do we use theory to understand and manipulate concrete things- to
model particular physical or socio-economic systems? The core idea is … the belief
in one great scientific system, a system of a small set of well-co-ordinated first prin-
ciples admitting a simple and elegant formulation, from which everything that
occurs, or everything of a certain type or in a certain category that occurs, can be
derived. But treatments of real systems are not deductive, ….(not) even if we tailor
our systems as much as possible to fit our theories, which is what we do when we
want to get the best predictions possible.’
This is the reason, and that is well known, why many drugs shown to have benefi-
cial effects in a highly selected patient population and well-controlled clinical trials,
don’t do as well in clinical practice. Cartwright got a lot of criticism to the kind of
criticism she articulated in How the Laws of Physics Lie but her response is clear,
and relates to the myth of the Legend: ‘I agree that my illustrations ….are ‘a far cry’
from showing that the system must be a great scientific lie. But I think we must
approach natural science with at least as much of the scientific attitude as natural
religion demands’.
Her examples are from physics, economics, medicine and genetics. Her conclu-
sions reminds on the one hand of the arguments of Nagel discussed above, and on
the other hand of the persuasive work of Richard Lewontin, which in a less analytic
and technical way, criticizing the ideologies of biology, genetics, molecular biology
and the dream of the human genome project and thus of the positivist molecular-
biologists and clinicians-researchers who believed would reductionist science solve
the problem of our diseases- cancer, cardiovascular, and mental illnesses alike.
(Lewontin, 2000; Lewontin et al., 1984).
Hillary Putnam (1926–2016) was a mathematician and philosopher who has had
a broad and deep impact on mathematics, ethics and the philosophy of science. He
is famous and admired for his critical thinking about the work of others, and inter-
estingly, as well as about his own work and has as consequence changed his philo-
sophical ideas and positions several times in his long career. He started as a student
with Hans Reichenbach, a major figure in pre-war analytical philosophy. Via posi-
tions amongst others at Princeton and MIT he worked at Harvard until 2000. In his
later years he wrote widely about American pragmatism (Putnam, 1995; Putnam &
Conant, 1994) and in particular how it could overcome the problems of the analyti-
cal philosophical tradition including foundationalism, and the various dualisms
such as the analytic-synthetic, the objective-subjective and the fact-value dichoto-
mies. His Reason, Truth and History (Putnam, 1981) is illuminating with respect to
the flaws of the positivist philosophy of the Legend. In particular Chap. 3, but also
more broadly the thinking presented in Chap. 8 are insightful. In 2004 he published
The collapse of the Fact/Value dichotomy (Putnam, 2002) where he discusses how
most ‘analytical philosophy of language and much metaphysics and epistemology
has been openly hostile to talk of human flourishing, regarding such talk as hope-
lessly “subjective”- often relegating all of ethics, in fact, to that waste baker cate-
gory’ (p viii), and he argues for the economics approach of Amartya Sen. He delves
deep, as always, and I will leave that to the more experienced reader but here I cite
the very last paragraph which is in plain English but boldly worded which makes his
position after a lifetime hard work on exactly these matters very clear:
‘I have argued that even when the judgments of reasonableness are left tacit, such judg-
ments are presupposed by scientific inquiry (indeed, judgments of coherence are essential
even at the observational level: we have to decide which observations to trust, which scien-
tists to trust-sometimes even which of our memories to trust.) I have argued that judgments
of reasonableness can be objective, and I have argued that they have all of the typical
properties of value judgments. In short, I have argued that my pragmatist teachers were
right: “knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values.” But the history of the phi-
losophy of science in the last half century has largely been a history of attempts - some of
which would be amusing, if the suspicion of the very idea of justifying a value judgment that
underlies them were not so serious in its implications- to evade this issue. Apparently any
fantasy -the fantasy of doing science using only deductive logic (Popper), the fantasy of
vindicating induction deductively (Reichenbach), the fantasy of reducing science to a sim-
ple sampling algorithm (Carnap), the fantasy of selecting theories given a mysteriously
available set of “true observation conditionals,” or, alternatively “settling for psychology”
(both Quine)- is regarded as preferable to rethinking the whole dogma (the last dogma of
empiricism?) that facts are objective and values are subjective and “never the twain shall
meet.” That rethinking is what pragmatists have been calling for for over a century When
will we stop evading the issue (“knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values.”)
(insert FM) and give the pragmatist challenge the serious attention it deserves? (p145)
I have in this philosophical time-travelling now arrived in the twenty-first cen-

tury. I want to discuss Philip Kitcher’s work, which for several reasons is of interest
in this context. Starting like Putnam from the analytical science tradition, he has
described his intellectual history since the 1980s, in the beginning criticizing some
and defending other parts of the Legend but gradually losing faith. Kitcher has been
reflecting on the philosophical transition he went through, from empirical positiv-
ism, natural empirism to a form of neopragmatism. Even in times when the more
general pragmatic turn was already going on in the field (Bernstein, 2010; Putnam
& Conant, 1990), he experienced how different this philosophical approach was, not
in the least in the eyes of his mainstream analytically thinking peers (Kitcher, 2012).
Kitcher in 1999 was appointed as John Dewey Professor of philosophy at Columbia.
From his website: ‘Following Dewey, I believe in the need for a reconstruction of
philosophy (so that it will not be a “sentimental indulgence for the few”), and I
worry about the increasing narrowness and professionalization of academic phi-
losophy. In working with graduate students, I hope to instil a capacity for clarity
and rigor without sacrificing the sense of why philosophy matters.’
In his The Advancement of Science (Kitcher, 1993), which carries the strong
subtitle “Science without a Legend, Objectivity without Illusion’, this struggle is
throughout the book most visible, but Kitcher is to be recommended for being very
explicit about it upfront and in the epilogue: ‘Once, in those dear dead days, almost,
but not quite, beyond recall, there was a view of science that commanded wide
spread popular and academic assent’….‘Legend celebrates scientists as well as sci-
ence’. …..scientists have achieved so much through the use of the SCIENTIFIC
METHOD.’..’there are objective canons of evaluation of scientific claims; by and
large, scientists (at least since the seventeenth century) have been tacitly aware of
these canons and have applied them in assessing novel or controversial ideas….’ (p3).
‘So much for the dear dead days. Since the late 1950s the mists have begun to
fall. Legend’s lustre is dimmed. While it may continue to figure in textbooks and
journalistic expositions, numerous intelligent critics now view Legend as a smug,
uninformed, unhistorical, and analytically shallow. Some of the critiques, science
bashers, regard the failure of science to live up to Legend’s advertising as reason
enough to question the hegemony of science in contemporary society. I shall not be
concerned with them, but with the critiques of the Legend bashers, those who believe
that Legend offered an unreal image of a worthy enterprise.’(p5) Kitcher acknowl-
edges that although he believes that the classical philosophy ‘belongs amongst the
greatest accomplishments of philosophy of our century’, it has been shown to have
its problems. He only once in a footnote (!) (p7) cites the devasting critique of
Popper discussed above and admits that ‘despite efforts of a few philosophers, little
headway has been made in finding a successor for Legend. If anything, recent work
in the history of science and the sociology of science has offered eve more sweeping
versions of the original critiques’……, I am not yet ready to abandon the search for
generality’ (bold applied by FM) p8.
Kitcher is much concerned with the objectivity of theory choice where indeed
(social) criteria are at play which according to Legend are non-epistemic because
external. He also wrestles many pages with the classical problem of representation
of reality by theory and of realism of the objects of science and in these discussions
uses, as per Legend, the success of natural science as kind of foundation, a warranty
for objectivity and realism. This feels like causality reversed. Kitcher at that time
believed that Legend could philosophically and sociologically be rescued, in his
way or another. He believed that ‘the Legend was broadly right about the character-
istics of science. Flawed people, working in complex social environments, moved by
all kind of interests, have collectively achieved a vision of parts of nature that is
broadly progressive and rests on arguments meeting standards that have been
refined and improved over centuries. Legend does not require burial but metamor-
phosis.’ p390 This defence of Legend is remarkable since writing this in 1993, he is
aware and discusses the seminal work of the scholars who convincingly showed, as
I discussed above, that the myth of ‘the scientific method’ and its normative canons,
never did relate much to daily practice of inquiry and the idea of foundationalism
did not hold. Kitcher (p10) admits that the Legend was a normative construction,
but incorrectly seems to suggest it came from studying science and can be rescued
by studying the practice of science again. Kitcher was at that time critized by Shapin
(cited by Kitcher p303) that he still worked from the Legend’s ‘individualism’ of the
scientist instead taking the work of many scholars to heart that shows the social
process and the community of inquiry in practice. Very interestingly, in the final
pages he suggests that philosophy should be normative and could suggest ethics and
values for how the enterprise of science could (and should) be organized to opti-
mally contribute to human flourishing: ‘Yet even if the metamorphosis of Legend
attempted here clears away those errors, it does not address the issue of the value
of science. To claim as I have done that that the sciences achieve certain epistemic
goals that we rightly prize is not enough- for the practice of science might be disad-
vantageous to human well-being in more direct was, practical ways. A convincing
account of practical progress will depend ultimately on articulating an ideal of
human flourishing against which we can appraise various strategies for doing sci-
ence. Given an ideal of human flourishing, how should we pursue our collective
investigation of nature……..how should we modify the institution as to enhance
human well-being?…. The philosophers have (no the Legend has .., FM) ignored
the social context of science. The point however is to change it.” (p391) I will return
to the later work of Kitcher, which shows his sharp pragmatic turn, when this topic
is discussed further in Chap. 4.
Helen Longino (born 1944) has focussed throughout her career as philosopher
on the social character of scientific inquiry. She is motivated in this work by
Women’s Studies, the role of social values and criteria, equality, gender and inclu-
siveness. She has studied it from different theoretical and practical viewpoints. She
understands the Legend and the struggle of the classical philosophers, including
Kitcher, to break free from the classical view of the scientific method, the Legend.
She is avoiding the extreme, that there is no objectivity in scientific inquiry at all,
argued by those who claim that it is determined by values and interests
only and unconstrained by empirical observations. In her widely appreciated
‘Science and Social Knowledge’(Longino, 1990) her tour the force on this is
described for the first time in an analysis contrasting the logical positivist
philosophy of Hempel with the ‘Wholism’, as she calles it, of Hanson, Kuhn and
Feyerabend. She goes basically through the same intellectual moves as the writers
cited above and, in the end, tries to present a contextual empiricist ‘scientific
method’ that is truly social in which the community of inquirers also takes social
values pertinent to the context of the work into account. ‘My concern is that with a
scientific practice perceived as having true or representative accounts of its subject
matter as a primary goal or good. When we are troubled about the role of contextual
values or value-laden assumptions in science, it is because we are thinking of scien-
tific inquiry as an activity whose intended outcome is the accurate understanding of
whatever structures and processes are being investigated. If that understanding is
itself conditioned by ours or others’ values, it cannot serve as a neutral and inde-
pendent guide.’ Against this she argues: ‘The dichotomy of these approaches should
not be seen so much as a contraction to be resolved in favour of one or the other
position, so much as reflective of a tension within science itself between its
knowledge-extending mission (application in contexts) and its critical mission (bet-
ter theories)’ p34.
‘In assessing particular research programmes, it is important to keep in mind that knowl-
edge extension (testing the effects of claims in experimental and real-world settings) and
truth (as accepted beliefs, Longino must mean to say) can guide scientific inquiry and
serves as fundamental, but not necessarily compatible, values determining its assessment.’
Thus, while a demonstration of the contextual value ladeness of a particular research pro-
gram may serve to disqualify it as a source of unvarnished truth about its subject matter,
such demonstration may have little bearing on one’s assessment of it as an example of sci-
entific inquiry.’(p36) (non-italic inserts are mine).
There is in Longino’s method, her epistemology, no timeless foundation, but

there are background assumptions, ethical, political, social and other, and there is a
practice of reasoning about them. They are under scrutiny, with full criticism and
eventual acceptance by the community of inquirers thus correcting for subjective
individual preferences (p216). These assumptions, like the classical scientific meth-
ods, are not insensitive to cultural and political changes brought about over periods
of time by changes in the world views of citizens wherever they live their life. The
myth or the Legend, Longino correctly observed, has served as a timeless and sta-
bile disguise providing an account that can ‘render invisible the background assump-
tions. The methodologies associated with logical positivism did render them
invisible, which is, I suspect, one reason they remain persuasive among scientists
even after being abandoned by philosophers……The myth of value neutrality, that
is the consequence of the more general view that scientific inquiry is independent of
its social context, is thus a functional myth.’ (p225).
This is an important insight. In fact, by employing this myth of neutrality, scien-
tific inquiry and science as a knowledge system in society is in first instance mainly
conservative, resisting critique regarding its accepted theoretical core, and its reflec-
tion on its own societal activity. It prohibits, or at least discourages on methodologi-
cal (epistemic) grounds, also the critique through scientific inquiry of the institutions
and social developments and conceals the interaction of science with public and
private power structures in society. This is as an example reflected in the negative
response of Polanyi and Russell, key opinion leaders in UK physics on BBC radio
broadcasted the beginning of 1945, to a caller’s question if something of practical
use could be expected to be done with quantum physics. Much later in 1962 Polanyi
‘actually,” admits, “the technical application of relativity…was to be revealed
within a few months by the explosion of the first atomic bomb.” ‘Polanyi argued that
because science is unpredictable, then its subsequent technical and social outcomes
are even more so. He weaves an intricate analogy between the conduct of science
and the play of the economic market, both of which exemplify how individuals can
maximize socially beneficial outcomes by pursuing their own interests and adjust-
ing, mutually but independently, to the interests of others. The same “invisible
hand” that guides the market guides science. While he allows that “Russell and I
should have done better in foreseeing these applications of relativity in January
1945,” he extends their own incapacity back a half century by also arguing that
“Einstein could not possibly take these future consequences into account when he
started on the problem which led to the discovery of relativity” because “another
dozen or more discoveries had yet to be made before relativity could be combined
with them to yield the technical progress which opened the atomic age” (Cited in
(Guston, 2012) Guston 2012 Minerva). A bit dubious this evasion of one of the
major ethical and political issues of twentieth century science, since Einstein and
Szilard having fled the Nazi’s to the US, in 1939 urged Roosevelt to get an atomic
bomb build before Hitler did. Its deployment against Japan had not been the idea of
a pacifist Einstein and many involved scientists, they instead had seen it as a major
means of deterrent. Einstein was until his dead active in the Federation of Atomic
Scientists and the Pughwash Conferences against proliferation of nuclear arms.
Longino concludes that this myth of neutrality is detrimental to major aspects of
the practice of modern science in chapters on research on sex differences, and the
genetics and biology of behaviour where ‘hard’ data is interpreted based on uncon-
tested hidden social assumptions. Inquiry explicitly investigation and criticizing
these cultural assumptions is per Legend declared non-scientific though, because of
contextual assumptions that are made explicit.
Ten years after, in ‘The Fate of Knowledge’ (Longino, 2002) she has gone further
down the road, further away from the timeless certainty of the Legend. She writes:
‘My aim in this book is the development of an account of scientific knowledge that
is responsive to the normative uses of the word “knowledge” and to the social con-
ditions in which scientific knowledge is produced. Recent work in history, philoso-
phy, and social and cultural studies of science has emphasized one or the other. As
a consequence, accounts intended to explicate the normative dimensions of our con-
cept- that is elaborating the relation of knowledge to concepts such as truth and
falsity, opinion, reason, and justification- have failed to get a purchase on actual
science, whereas accounts detailing actual episodes of scientific inquiry have sug-
gested that our ordinary normative concepts have no relevance to science or that
science fails the test of good epistemic practice. That can’t be right. The chapters
that follow offer a diagnosis of this stalemate and an alternative account. I argue
that the stalemate is produced by an acceptance by both parties of a dichotomous
understanding of the rational and the social.’ (p1).
This is one of the main problems in science and academia, nearly 20 years later
because we still see this stalemate and in our debate about science its characteristic
discourse. Longino addresses the underlying assumption of this classical dualism of
the Legend and rejects them, which opens up the possibility of a concept of science
where internal and external criteria of value both can be used to make choices in
science. She in 2002 immediately (on p3) goes to the work of Mill, Peirce and
Popper who early on realised that science and the method used to come to accepted
beliefs is not an individual but a truly social process, which as we have discussed
goes against the Legend. Regarding Popper she points out correctly that Popper, as
cited above, praised philosophers who involve in their analyses ‘theories, and pro-
cedures, and, most important, (of) scientific discussions’, ‘contingent factors oper-
ating in the world of human affairs are beyond his epistemology’. ‘Unlike discussions
by Mill and Peirce, Popper’s theory of knowledge deliberately bypasses the connec-
tion to science and inquiry as practiced and remains the ideal’ (p7). I cite her own
resume of the book which is mainly dealing with the problem of what she calls the
Rational-Social Dichotomy which as we saw is a main pillar of the Legend: ‘The
work in social and cultural studies has stimulated a range of responses from phi-
losophers. Some simply rejected the relevance of this work to philosophical con-
cerns, or ….have seen it as empirically and conceptually misguided. Some like
Philip Kitcher…have tried to take the sting out of it, by sifting through the claims of
the sociologists and sociologically oriented historians attempting refutation of
those they deem extremist, and then incorporating a sensitivity to history or socio-
logical analysis into their constructivist accounts of inquiry. …, I argue that these
efforts, too, are vitiated by a commitment to the dichotomy of rational and the
social. I offer an account of scientific knowledge that not only avoids the dichotomy
but integrates the conceptual and normative concerns of philosophers with the
descriptive work of the sociologists and historians.
Longino aims to integrate in the understanding of scientific inquiry the fact that
‘cognitive capacities are exercised socially, that is interactively’ and argues that
more ‘more complete epistemology for science must include norms that apply to
practices of communities in addition to norms conceived as applying to practices of
individuals. Following through on the consequences of the analyses breaking with
conventional views of scientific knowledge as permanent, as ideally complete, and
as unified and unifiable….means accepting provisionality, partiality, and plurality
of scientific knowledge. ...I insist on an epistemology for living science, produced by
real empirical subjects. This is an epistemology that accepts that scientific knowl-
edge cannot be fully understood apart from its deployments in particular material,
intellectual and social contexts.’ She makes it clear that there need to be pluralism
in these epistemologies.
Longino wants to take advantage in her epistemologies of both the Rational and
the Social and takes us through some technical chapters, in which she makes it clear
that we have a lot to figure out if we (want to properly) use a mix of rational norma-
tive criteria from the philosophers and the social criteria and norms the sociologists
have revealed. This is especially interesting knowing that scientists do use in their
field validated standard, methods and accepted ways of reasoning, but do not take
the normative canons of the Legend to seriously in their daily practice, whereas they
use consciously and unconsciously the social norms and values derived from their
cultural upbringing in all its aspects of a society. In the last ten pages she concludes
that the Rational-Social classes of criteria and norms are thus not used in separation,
‘sociality does not come into play at the limit of or instead of the cognitive. Instead,
these social processes are cognitive. ….and the social epidemiologist must have
resources for the correction of ..epistemically undermining possibilities.’ This is
required since opening up to the social, the stakeholders in society, opens up to
power games which may be to the disadvantage of those problems which are vulner-
able to ‘inappropriate exercise of authority and biases. This is as we discussed (in
Chap. 1) a problem of all times, past and yet to come, because scientific inquiry is
not autonomous, value-free and not neutral and is not guided by the invisible hand
of the Legend who tells us how best to allocate our public and private funds. Longino
offers at the very end of the book a set of questions that demonstrate that she sees a
lot of problems here for philosophers to work on for instance how goal-oriented
inquiry and ‘different kinds of goal might affect philosophy and knowledge and
practices. She goes one step further and involves in these questions ‘the institu-
tional organizations and how they affect the content of knowledge’ and asks ‘How
can a society use science to address problems when scientific goals and community
structures are not mutually aligned? These questions bring out the political dimen-
sions of science and broaden our conception of what philosophy of science can
be about.’
Finally, she asks ‘What kinds of institutional changes are necessary to sustain
the credibility, and hence value, of scientific inquiry while maintaining democratic
decision making regarding the cognitive and practical choices the sciences make
possible and necessary? The fate of knowledge rest in our answers’.
With these questions, that almost all philosophers of science like Popper con-
sider ‘beyond their epistemology or theory of knowledge and deliberately bypass’,
we return to the main problems addressed here: how does the Legend still determine
the ideas and politics of scientific inquirers which distorts the collective of scientific
inquiry, causes the current problems of science. Legend and its legacy has detrimen-
tal effects on our interaction with society and their publics and thus the knowledge
we produce, this is ‘the fate of knowledge’ Longino is concerned with. Longino,
after her own struggle with the dualism of the Legend, boldly has been going where
sociologists, physicists, chemists, historians, even anthropologists, but few philoso-
phers have gone before. Still, the reviewers of the book who praised her for that,
criticize her for not presenting a detailed epistemology. Longino knew how the
work of Dewey and James had been received by the ‘real analytical philosophers’ of
their times, that must have offered some consolation.
2.3 Conclusion
owards a Realistic Pragmatist View of Science, Natural Science

T
and Social Science and Humanities
From the late 1960s philosophers, sociologist and historians of science gradu-
ally, but definitely showed the Legend of the ‘Scientific Method’ to be untenable:
• There is no one formal scientific method that leads us to the truth
• There is no God-given or timeless, universal foundation for such a method
to build on
• Knowledge is arrived at, not by individuals in isolation ‘talking to nature’
• There are many ways (methodologies) to do good research
• In sharing ideas and experimental results and methods, for debate and scru-
tiny in a rigorous and communitive process by the community of inquirers
• Inquiry is a social process producing reliable knowledge that produced
objective (intersubjective) knowledge
• Research is guided by our common cognitive and cultural values, when
tested in experiments and discussions with peers constrained by natural and
social reality
• Knowledge is tested in interventions and (social) actions in practice
• It is then either rejected, improved or it is accepted for the time being
• Knowledge claims are fallible, absolute and always up to scrutiny and tests
• It is this communitive open, independent and transparent process that is
unique to science which has produced knowledge which has been proven to
be reliable over the past centuries.
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Chapter 3
Science in Transition How Science Goes
Wrong and What to Do About It
Abstract Science in Transition, which started in 2013, is a small-scale Dutch ini-

tiative that presented a systems approach, comprised of analyses and suggested
actions, based on experience in academia. It was built on writings by early science
watchers and most recent theoretical developments in philosophy, history and soci-
ology of science and STS on the practice and politics of science. This chapter will
include my personal experiences as one of the four Dutch founders of Science in
Transition. I will discuss the message and the various forms of reception over the
past 6 years by the different actors in the field, including administrators in univer-
sity, academic societies and Ministries of Higher Education, Economic Affairs and
Public Health but also from leadership in the private sector. I will report on my
personal experience of how these myths and ideologies play out in the daily practice
of 40 years of biomedical research in policy and decision making in lab meetings,
at departments, at grant review committees of funders and in the Board rooms and
the rooms of Deans, Vice Chancellors and Rectors.
It has in the previous chapters become clear that the ideology and ideals that we
are brought up with are not valid, are not practiced despite that even in 2020 they are
still somehow ‘believed’ by most scientists and even by many science watchers,
journalists and used in political correct rhetoric and policy making by science’s
leadership. In that way these ideologies and beliefs mostly implicitly but sometimes
even explicitly determine debates regarding the internal policy of science and sci-
ence policy in the public arena. These include all time classic themes like the
uniqueness of science compared to any other societal activity; ethical superiority of
science and scientists based on Mertonian norms; the vocational disinterested search
for truth, autonomy; values and moral (political) neutrality, dominance of internal
epistemic values and unpredictability regards impact. These ideas have influenced
debates about the ideal and hegemony of natural science, the hierarchy of basic over
applied science; theoretical over technological research and at a higher level in aca-
demic institutions and at the funders the widely held supremacy of STEM over
SSH. This has directly determined the attitudes of scientists in the interaction with
peers within the field, but also shaped the politics of science within science but also
© The Author(s) 2022 67

F. Miedema, Open Science: the Very Idea,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-2115-6_3
68 3 Science in Transition How Science Goes Wrong and What to Do About It
with policy makers and stakeholders from the public and private sector and with
interactions with popular media.
Science it was concluded was suboptimal because of growing problems with the
quality and reproducibility of its published products due to failing quality control at
several levels. Because of too little interactions with society during the phases of
agenda setting and the actual process of knowledge production, its societal impact
was limited which also relates to the lack of inclusiveness, multidisciplinarity and
diversity in academia. Production of robust and significant results aiming at real
world problems are mainly secondary to academic output relevant for an internally
driven incentive and reward system steering for academic career advancement at the
individual level. Similarly, at the higher organizational and national level this reward
system is skewed to types of output and impact focused on positions on interna-
tional ranking lists. This incentive and reward system, with flawed use of metrics,
drives a hyper-competitive social system in academia which results in a widely felt
lack of alignment and little shared value in the academic community. Empirical
data, most of it from within science and academia, showing these problems in dif-
ferent academic disciplines, countries and continents are published on virtually a
weekly basis since 2014. These critiques focus on the practices of scholarly publish-
ing including Open Access and open data, the adverse effects of the incentive and
reward system, in particular its flawed use of metrics. Images, ideologies and poli-
tics of science were exposed that insulate academia and science from society and its
stakeholders, which distort the research agenda and subsequentially its societal and
economic impact.
3.1 The Royal Response (1)
In the fall of 2012, there were a few high-profile academic public events that were
related to the discovery in the year before of a few serious fraud cases in The
Netherlands in biomedicine and social psychology. The latter case was shocking
and notorious for how it had been done with unflinching arrogance over many
years. Because of its size and impact, it became worldwide known. I was present at
the meeting held in September at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences where
Kees Schuyt, a prominent sociologist and law scholar, as chair of a committee of
the Royal Academy presented the advice that was focussed on responsible handling
of research data (KNAW, 2012). The conclusions of the advice and of the meeting
at the Royal Academy was that fraud and violation of the principles of integrity in
research was believed to be very rare, but that it should be investigated. The feeling
was that education of researchers about integrity, but also in the institutions techni-
cal proper handling of data should be promoted and enabled. Very cautiously the
idea was mentioned of the obligation for researchers to making data available that
supported claims in a journal paper to improve peer review. Finally, it was con-
cluded that informal peer pressure in the community and in the later stages more
3.1 The Royal Response (1) 69
formally through peer review should be improved. Despite a classical reference to

the ‘leading values of science which are distinct from any other social activity’ and
cautious conclusions, the committee did pose a series of critical questions that they
believed should not be evaded. They suggested that the social system in which
individual researchers do their work might allow or even invite misconduct. In that
context they mention the incentive and reward system with its academic hierarchies
and publication pressure (p60). The panel with members of Academy and Young
Academy largely agreed. Of interest was the mentioning of some examples of seri-
ous fraud in physics (amongst others ‘the Schön’ case). In response to this, a very
senior Royal Society member from the natural sciences remarked that of course
this issue of quality is typical for ‘the soft sciences and biomedicine, but not for us
in the hard sciences, because in physics, through our experimentation, we ask a
question to nature and nature gives a clear answer, so physics is beyond fraud’.
The chairman, a theology scholar who early in his career had become a profes-
sional university administrator, who knew about the problem of foundations,
decided to let that one go. At the conclusion of the debate, I made a short critical
remark from the floor, that something is really wrong with science if we focus on
the rare fraud cases but are looking away from to the growing evidence of a large
‘grey zone’ of shoddy science, also in other disciplines than biomedicine and social
psychology. This grey zone is not populated with fraudsters or bad people who are
to blame, but honest researchers that try to survive in our crazy academic system
driven by perverse incentives and rewards. This I thought should be acknowledged
and discussed. What I had in mind then was in fact to become one of the corner
stones of Science in Transition and of this book. The chairman’s reply was ‘that
may be so, but we cannot change a whole system’ and then there were drinks, gos-
sip and appetizers (typically Dutch ‘bitterballen’) in the foyer.
Kees Schuyt was interviewed in a national newspaper and to my relief was much
more open about the likely systemic cause of the problems. In October at a meeting
held in Spui 25, a University of Amsterdam open podium/debate centre, Huub
Dijstelbloem took part in the panel discussion with Kees Schuyt and Andre
Knottnerus an authority in the Dutch health science and governmental science
advice system. The debate was much more open and critical and did not evade the
problems of the system.
November 28, 2012, at the Royal Academy again, a committee chaired by Pim
Levelt, a former President of the Academy, presented its investigation of fraud and
misconduct of Diederik Stapel. (https://www.rug.nl/about-us/news-and-events/
news/news2012/stapel-eindrapport-ned.pdf). This case, together with a case at
Erasmus Medical Centre, since their discovery in September and December 2011,
dominated the debate about trust in science in the country. The committee revealed
the technical and methodological aspects of the case in great detail. In their final
comments they state that ‘Committees that have evaluated the research of social
psychology, have not recognized some of the signals that the committee in this
70 3 Science in Transition How Science Goes Wrong and What to Do About It
report do describe. They simply were relying on peer review both with respect to
methodology and contribution to theory. Another issue in this context is to what
degree these evaluation committees are instrumental in sustaining the assumed
undue publication pressure and connected mores and behaviours. This specifi-
cally concerns requirements of numbers of publications, the order of authors,
responsibilities of co-authors and repeated publication of similar results.’ (trans-
lation FM).
The Science in Transition Team

A year later in November 2013, the public start of Science in Transition took
place at the same prestigious venue of the Royal Academy of Arts and
Sciences on one of the channels in the centre of Amsterdam. The Science in
Transition team started its work in January 2013. Huub Dijstelbloem, whom I
already mentioned, had the years before been very active in national debates
about incentive and rewards focussed on inclusive indicators and methods for
evaluation of the impact of research. He also studied public participation and
policy making which is discussed in Chap. 5. The other three members of the
group that started Science in Transition, were Jerome Ravetz and professors
Frank Huisman and Wijnand Mijnhardt. The five of us did not really know
each other, but we shared our thinking about science which brought us
together.
Jerome Ravetz (1929), Jerry, as we call him, replied promptly and enthusi-
astically, full of energy looking for action when I had send him in the fall of
2012 my little book about science, Science 3.0, Real Science, Significant
Knowledge (Miedema, 2012). I did not know him, but knew his 1971 book
(see Chap. 2). Ravetz with a small group of colleagues had published in 1993
a paper in which they described another way of doing science, explicitly with
the aim to deal with policy issues of high risk and high uncertainty for science
is critical but for which the time for deliberation is limited. They coined the
name Post-Normal Science for an approach in an integrated and democratized
process in which all relevant knowledge and social values and the relevant
publics are fully acknowledged and participate (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993).
In the months that followed Jerry received a Fellowship of the Descartes
Centre of Utrecht University which brought him and his wife frequently to
Utrecht. His first visit was to Amsterdam on January 4, 2013 when we talked
the whole day and part of the evening about his work, his thoughts about sci-
ence in 2013 and the actions to be taken.
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40 2 Images of

Science: A Reality Check

Habermas in his Erkenntnis und Interesse in 1968 translated in English in

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Polanyi, who as we saw criticized positivism, concludes two different things

Marxism? Critical Theory?

The huge impact of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pub-

It is important to take note that Lakatos, in his one-hundred-page long contribu-

It’s Anthropology, Stupid!

philosophy, but must be understood in that pragmatism is a reaction by ‘peripheral’

I have in this philosophical time-travelling now arrived in the twenty-first cen-

There is in Longino’s method, her epistemology, no timeless foundation, but

owards a Realistic Pragmatist View of Science, Natural Science

Descartes, R. (1968). Discourse on method, and other writings. Penguin.

Abstract Science in Transition, which started in 2013, is a small-scale Dutch ini-

© The Author(s) 2022 67

3.1 The Royal Response (1)

formally through peer review should be improved. Despite a classical reference to

The Science in Transition Team

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Book - Science in Social Context-3

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40 2 Images of

Science: A Reality Check

Habermas in his Erkenntnis und Interesse in 1968 translated in English in

In the 1958 introduction to the English translation of The Logic of Scientific

Polanyi, who as we saw criticized positivism, concludes two different things

Marxism? Critical Theory?

The huge impact of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pub-

It is important to take note that Lakatos, in his one-hundred-page long contribu-

It’s Anthropology, Stupid!

philosophy, but must be understood in that pragmatism is a reaction by ‘peripheral’

I have in this philosophical time-travelling now arrived in the twenty-first cen-

There is in Longino’s method, her epistemology, no timeless foundation, but

 owards a Realistic Pragmatist View of Science, Natural Science

Descartes, R. (1968). Discourse on method, and other writings. Penguin.

Abstract Science in Transition, which started in 2013, is a small-scale Dutch ini-

© The Author(s) 2022 67

3.1 The Royal Response (1)

formally through peer review should be improved. Despite a classical reference to

The Science in Transition Team

You might also like

owards a Realistic Pragmatist View of Science, Natural Science

3.1 The Royal Response (1)